José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) was of the generation before deconstruction, but I was stuck by these comments on post-Kantian German Idealism:
“never before has a lack of truthfulness played such a large and important role in philosophy”
And:
“They did whatever they felt like doing with concepts. As if by magic they changed anything into any other thing.”
That fits nicely with someone’s argument that postmodernism comes out of the devolution that began with Kantian epistemology.
Source: José Ortega y Gasset, Phenomenology and Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975; see “Preface for Germans,” p. 48).